Woman discovers relatives were spies during Second World War

WHEN Jennie Milne decided to find out about her past she never expected to discover that her family tree reads more like a spy novel.

Jennie Milne's grandmother, Helena (left) was pregnant with her mother during the war

To her amazement, she learned that both her maternal grandparents and an uncle had links to the Allied intelligence services having fled their native Poland during the Second World War.

The 47-year-old, who only started to look into her ancestry following her mother Elizabeth Lister’s death last year, is still desperate to find out more about her roots and believes that further secrets could lie in Britain's wartime archives.

She found out her grandfather, Stanislaw Lis, had escaped from the Germans and landed in or near Dundee in 1941 and went on to train troops in the Polish Home Army throughout the war, at locations up and the east coast.

His wife and Jennie’s grandmother, Helena, may have been evacuated to Britain together with the Polish Government following Hitler's invasion of the country in 1939.

It is this latter story that holds much of the intrigue for the mother-of-nine, who lives in Inverallochy, near Fraserburgh, in Aberdeenshire with her husband Brian and their children.

Jennie learned that Helena had been aged 41 when she gave birth to her mother in 1943 but left her baby in a remote home in Devon when the infant was just 10-days-old with promises of returning after the war.

She believes the heartbreaking decision may have been down to her role as a spy for the Allied Forces.

“My mum was told her dad had been shot down over France and killed and that her mother had abandoned her,” the keen photographer says.

“She never really came to terms with that and was always looking for something and I think that’s why I have this real urge to find out who she really was.

My mum was told her dad had been shot down over France and killed and that her mother had abandoned her

Jennie Milne

“I’ve known all my life about the abandonment and I found out in 1999 my mother had actually met up with her parents.

“I asked her to write down everything she knew about her background but didn’t do anything with it until maybe 14 months ago, after her death.

“What I have discovered is that my grandmother was a real mystery.

She hid an awful lot of things including her own daughter. We don’t know if she really was a spy but that is a possibility. My mother certainly believed she’d been in the Special Forces although her MoD file does not say that.

“What I do know is that sometime in the past her name and that of her sister’s had been changed. Her real birth name was Malie Rothenberg, which is a Jewish name, and her sister was called Roza.

“When the records were found in Stryj, Poland, we didn’t immediately realise Malie was Helena because the year of birth and the name were different but Roza became Irene and my grandmother became Helena. They also changed the family name to Solomirecka, which apparently is a noble, very old Polish name.

“When and why the names were changed, I have not been able to discover and I do not know if they were really aristocratic although my grandmother’s death certificate says she was a baroness.”

As well as the Polish Home Army, the Polish Government in exile had a special forces unit based in Essex and known as the Cichociemni, or 'The Dark and Silent'. It had more than 600 operatives who worked alongside Britain's Special Operations Executive, running a network of spies throughout Europe and even playing a key role in Operation Foxley, the SOE's plan to assassinate Hitler.

It has taken Jennie months to piece together the family history. She discovered Elizabeth tracked down her parents in the 1960s – they were both in London, divorced and remarried – but lost touch again.

She died of cancer in January 2014 not knowing what had become of them and her daughter – one of a brood of seven – felt it her duty to discover more.

Jennie says: “My mother never knew much of her parents. She did meet her father, Stanislaw, quite a few times in London but then lost contact. She never realised he had died suddenly in 1967.

“He had not known he had a daughter but had accepted her immediately.

“I think she only met her mother a couple of times at the most and she told her she’d never stopped looking for the baby she’d been forced to leave behind.

“How she concealed her pregnancy from my grandfather and her Army unit I will never find out.

I think that because it was war time and dangerous she felt her husband would have told her to leave the Army to look after the baby and maybe she felt she wasn’t able to do that at the time.”

Through Helena’s MoD records, Jennie discovered she had remarried and was able to trace her death certificate and a will which led her to a family in America she did not know existed.

With the help of Jewish genealogy expert, Glasgow-based Michael Tobias, she also tracked down her great-aunt Irene and her son, James, who emigrated across the Atlantic, as well as some cousins who now live in New Jersey.

Incredibly, James also had had links to various intelligence agencies, including the CIA and he received the Purple Heart after he was wounded during the Korean War of the early 1950s.

“My grandmother told my mum she had a nephew who had been so badly beaten up by Gestapo aged 14 that he nearly died but had gone to America with his mother to have reconstructive surgery,” Jennie recalls.

“I was able to get hold of my grandmother’s MoD records and found out about her second marriage.

I then discovered her death certificate and was able to get her will.

She named her nephew James Russocki in that document and an American friend tracked down his obit and through that I was able to find his daughters Sandra and Renata.

“When I phoned Renata for the first time last October it was the first they knew they had family in the UK. This is the first time our family have come together since the Holocaust.

“But I would dearly like to find out more. Did anyone know my grandfather? How about my grandmother?

“It would be amazing to find out anything more about my grandfather or any of my family.”